The spiral structure of our Milky Way

Abstract

The spiral structure of our Milky Way has not yet been well outlined. HII regions, giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and 6.7-GHz methanol masers are primary tracers for spiral arms. We collect and update the database of these tracers which has been used in Hou et al. (2009) for the spiral arms.

The new database consists of ∼ 2000 HII regions, ∼ 1300 GMCs and ∼ 800 methanol masers (6.7 GHz). If the photometric or trigonometric distance for any tracer is available from the literature, we will adopt it. Otherwise, we have to use the kinematic distance. We modify the V_LSR according to the newly determined solar motions (U₀ = 10.27 km s⁻¹, V₀ = 15.32 km s⁻¹ and W₀ = 7.74 km s⁻¹, Schönrich et al. 2010), then calculate the kinematic distances with a flat rotation curve (R₀ = 8.3 kpc, θ₀ = 239 km s⁻¹, Brunthaler et al. 2011). Very important step is that we weight tracers according to the excitation parameters of HII regions or the masses of GMCs, and a constant weight for masers. All three kinds of tracers are used together to outline the spiral structure (Fig. 1). A contour and gray map is constructed after we made a Gaussian extension for the tracers with the amplitude of weighting parameter.